An Unsolved Killing

What does the firing of a U.S. Attorney have to do with a murder case?

Tom Wales, an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Seattle who became a gun-control activist, was killed in his home in 2001.

ILLUSTRATION BY ALEX WILLIAMSON, PHOTO COURTESY WALES FOUNDATION

Tom Wales was not supposed to be home on the night of October 11, 2001. Wales, an Assistant United States Attorney in Seattle, had planned to have dinner and spend the evening with his girlfriend, Marlis DeJongh, a court reporter who lived downtown. But that afternoon Wales called DeJongh and said that he had projects he needed to work on at home. In the evening, after leaving his office, near the federal courthouse, he returned to his Craftsman-style, wood-frame house in a quiet neighborhood known as Queen Anne.

Wales was forty-nine years old and had been a federal prosecutor for eighteen years. When he worked late, which was often, he would tell his family and friends, “I’m here at my post, serving my sovereign.” The phrase was partly a joke, a bit of feigned grandiosity to justify a tendency toward excessive meticulousness: Wales did things slowly. He also had idealistic notions about his work. He took satisfaction in mustering the resources of the federal government to take on criminals, especially those with white collars who abused their privileged status.

On the night of October 11th, Wales arrived home after 7 P.M., gave his twenty-year-old cat, Sam, her nightly arthritis medication, and prepared to install some drywall in a stairwell on the second floor. At about ten o’clock, carrying a glass of wine, he went to the basement office that he had been sharing with his ex-wife, Elizabeth. Tom and Elizabeth had met as high-school students at Milton Academy, outside Boston, and married when Tom was an undergraduate at Harvard. They had a son and a daughter, who at the time were both in Britain, attending graduate school, and they had divorced, amicably, in 2000. (Elizabeth had come out as a lesbian, and the marriage was an inevitable casualty.) Under the terms of the divorce, Tom kept the house, though Elizabeth, a literary agent, ran her business from the basement during the day. Tom used a computer there at night, usually to send e-mails to his children and to DeJongh. That night, he had also planned to work on a fund-raising letter for Washington CeaseFire, the leading gun-control advocacy group in the state, of which he was president.

The Waleses had renovated the house during the years that they lived there, and in the basement they had installed a picture window, which provided a view of the small back yard. At 10:24 P.M., Wales sent an e-mail to DeJongh from the computer, which was on a desk in front of the window. About fifteen minutes later, someone shot him three or four times through the window from the back yard. (Investigators won’t divulge the exact number of shots.) Mary Aylward, an elderly woman who lived next door, heard the shots and called 911. An off-duty police officer, who happened to be nearby, arrived within minutes. Wales appeared to be conscious, but he couldn’t speak, and was taken by ambulance to the trauma center at the Harborview Medical Center, in Seattle.

Friends and colleagues gathered at the hospital, among them Jerry Diskin, the acting U.S. Attorney, who also lived in Queen Anne and had heard the shots; Gil Kerlikowske, Seattle’s chief of police; Bob Westinghouse, another Assistant U.S. Attorney, and his wife, Kay; and Eric Redman, one of Wales’s closest friends, who had once been married to Elizabeth’s sister. They were told that Wales was in surgery. Just before dawn, a surgeon emerged from the operating room to say that Wales had died. “The doctor obviously had put clean scrubs on to come out and talk to us,” Redman recalled. “She didn’t come out with blood all over her. When I was standing there talking to her, it was hard to look her in the eye. I looked down and saw that the bottom seams of her trousers were covered with blood.”

United States Attorneys are political appointees, who serve at the pleasure of the President. They establish the priorities for each of the nation’s ninety-four judicial districts and announce significant indictments and arrests; many are well known in their communities. Assistant U.S. Attorneys are more like civil servants; they perform the day-to-day work on important investigations and their public speaking is typically limited to the courtroom. They often leave after a few years for better-paying jobs at law firms. Tom Wales was an exception to this pattern.

After graduating from law school, at Hofstra University, Wales took a job with the New York law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. “But Tom always wanted to do something for society, and that kind of life was never for him,” Elizabeth Wales told me. In 1983, he was hired as a federal prosecutor in Seattle. Tom and Elizabeth, a tall, lean, and athletic couple, took to life in the Northwest, going on long hikes in the Olympic Mountains and the Cascades. Tom became a neighborhood activist, fighting overdevelopment and the placement of cell-phone towers, and serving for a couple of years on the Seattle Planning Commission.

Tom was fond of local wines and liked to cook—he was especially proud of his fruitcake. But he could also be ornery and competitive. At weekly lunches of the two dozen or so federal prosecutors in Seattle, Wales was a combative presence. “Tom would always eat the same thing, a peanut-butter-and-ketchup sandwich,” Lis Wiehl, who was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Seattle in the nineteen-nineties, recalled. “And everyone would sit around and discuss their cases. Tom and Bob Westinghouse had all the big white-collar cases, and they’d just sit there and scream at each other the whole time. They were good friends, but that was how they related.”

In 1995, a student at the high school that the Waleses’ son attended brought a gun to school and shot and injured two classmates. Tom was horrified. “The idea so outraged him—the idea that a kid could be shot at school—that he decided to get involved,” Elizabeth Wales told me. “It was a good issue for him, because people were passionate about it. People don’t like to handle those kinds of things, but Tom wasn’t afraid.” Wales soon became president of Washington CeaseFire, and in 1997 he led a campaign in favor of a statewide ballot referendum on a proposal to require gun owners to use trigger locks. As an Assistant U.S. Attorney, Wales was prohibited from running for office and from taking sides in partisan elections, but the law permitted him to campaign on issues to be decided by referendum. Among his colleagues in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Wales’s political activism was considered unusual, but it was also generally accepted.

The proposal brought out the full might of the pro-gun lobby, which spent four million dollars—primarily on television advertisements and direct-mail appeals—and voters rejected the measure, seventy-one to twenty-nine per cent. Nevertheless, the gun initiative established Wales as a public figure in Washington State, and, a few months before he died, he was invited to give the commencement address at a Seattle community college. Wales delivered a manifesto in defense of his liberal politics. “John Lennon said, before he was shot and killed outside the Dakota Apartments in New York, ‘Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans,’ ” Wales told the students. “Be engaged; be involved in what goes on around you. Be present in your own life. Find something you believe in passionately and get into it. Get outraged. Take a stand.

“For me, among other things, it’s gun control,” Wales went on. He cited an incident that had occurred two years earlier, in which a gunman shot and killed three people in a Seattle shipyard. “The next day, the papers reported that, within minutes of the shooting, the Seattle School District had been able to lock down every school within a two-mile radius of the shootings,” Wales said. “My first thought was Well, good for the school district for doing a fine job protecting our kids. But wait a minute. Is this Kosovo, Bosnia, Beirut, Rwanda—that we have to lock down our schools to protect our children?” He added, “I’ve spent the past ten years building Washington CeaseFire into an organization that takes on the N.R.A. at every turn.” He went on to denounce the death penalty (which had recently been imposed on Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber), and to express alarm about global warming, which was not yet a mainstream concern.

“He had so much fun with that speech,” Steve Kidder, Wales’s college roommate, said. “He told us how, when he left the podium, two mothers of graduates came up to him during the procession out of the hall. One told him it was the worst speech she had ever heard, and the other told him it was the best speech she had ever heard. I’m not sure which reaction he enjoyed more.” Trevor Neilson, the vice-president of Washington CeaseFire at the time, said, “Being a federal prosecutor, he came across as anything but the weak liberal that the N.R.A. likes to characterize as the typical supporter of gun control. We were talking very actively about his running for Seattle City Council. There is no question that Tom would have gone on to be mayor, governor, or senator, and that was likely to happen soon.”

Paradoxically, Wales’s murder was in some ways a boon for Washington CeaseFire. A month after he was killed, the group held a benefit in his honor, which was attended by more than five hundred people, including many prominent Democratic politicians in the state, and raised five hundred thousand dollars. The featured speaker was the documentary filmmaker Rory Kennedy, who is the daughter of Robert F. Kennedy and the sister of Joseph P. Kennedy II, the former Massachusetts congressman, who had been Wales’s roommate at Milton. Wales, who was the president of the student body and the captain of the football team at Milton, roomed with Kennedy the fall after his father was assassinated.

At the Justice Department, the reaction to Wales’s murder was more muted. Neither John Ashcroft, then the Attorney General, nor any of his top deputies attended Wales’s funeral. The highest-ranking official present was the director of the executive office of United States Attorneys, a mid-level official who coördinates administrative support for federal prosecutors. “The Justice Department was so disappointing,” Gil Kerlikowske, the Seattle police chief, who shared Wales’s commitment to gun control, said. “Here you have a cold-blooded murder of an A.U.S.A., and I could not imagine that the only person they sent out was this executive director.”

The F.B.I. gave the investigation the code name SEPROM—short for “Seattle prosecutor murder”—but the bureau set the reward for tips leading to a prosecution in the case at twenty-five thousand dollars, which was widely regarded in Seattle as an insultingly small amount, and did not offer local investigators assistance from Washington, D.C. “We put a lot of agents on the Wales case from the beginning,” Charles Mandigo, the special agent in charge of the bureau’s Seattle office at the time, told me. “But we got no backfill from headquarters—that is, additional agents. In other major cases that headquarters really cared about, they’d say, ‘You’re not going to bleed resources, and you’ll get all the backfill you need.’ The feeling was that H.Q. was so preoccupied with 9/11 that they were neglecting the issue of whether it was fair to the office to have to put all its resources on the case without getting backfill.”

Two weeks after the murder, the Senate confirmed a new U.S. Attorney for western Washington, John McKay. “When I got there, on October 30th, there was still yellow tape around Tom’s office,” McKay recalled. “It was still considered a crime scene. People still wept. From the prosecutors to the secretaries to the administrative staff, it was a traumatized place. It was not just that they lost somebody, but somebody they all knew and liked very much.” McKay had met Wales several times in the company of other A.U.S.A.s, but knew him mainly by reputation. “Most A.U.S.A.s keep a much lower public profile than Tom did,” he said. “However, he was fully entitled to do what he was doing, and he violated no Department of Justice policies.” He added, “I personally would not be in full agreement with his organization”—Washington CeaseFire—“but I fully supported his right to participate and admired him for his community involvement.”

McKay’s family is sometimes described as a Pacific Northwest (and Republican) version of the Kennedy family. McKay’s brother Mike, the oldest of twelve children, is a prominent Seattle lawyer who served as the U.S. Attorney for western Washington in the first Bush Administration. Several other siblings are active in law and politics. The McKays share bluff Irish good looks, fierce devotion to one another, and—by reputation, anyway—formidable tempers. John McKay, the fifth child, has a somewhat unconventional résumé for a U.S. Attorney. After graduating from college, at the University of Washington, and from law school, at Creighton University, in Omaha, he practiced law in Seattle until 1997, when he was named president of the Legal Services Corporation, a nonpartisan office within the federal government that funds programs that provide lawyers for poor people. He left that post to become the U.S. Attorney in Seattle.

“The Wales case was awkward for me from the start, because our office was recused from doing the actual investigation,” McKay said. “I agreed with the decision to recuse. This is a potential death-penalty case. You couldn’t have Tom’s friends in the office making those kinds of decisions. And I thought at first it meant that I should have nothing at all to do with the investigation. Then, several months after I became U.S. Attorney, I had a brown-bag lunch with my staff, and I got my head handed to me by several senior A.U.S.A.s in very strong terms. They said the department was neglecting the investigation of Tom’s death. They thought the prosecutor assigned from headquarters, who came out of the organized-crime unit, was not up to the job. I heard it all—not enough agents, the wrong prosecutor from Washington, the small reward. They were right to raise it with me.

“My mistake was that I assumed ‘recusal’ was ‘recusal,’ ” McKay went on. “I had erred in assuming that I was completely recused from even asking questions about the allocation of resources. I assumed it would have the highest priority within the Department of Justice. I once worked at the F.B.I. for a year, and during that time an agent was killed in Las Vegas. They deploy like crazy when an agent is killed. Agents got off the airplane that night from D.C. to investigate. The director of the F.B.I. flew out. That was not the reaction we were getting from the Department of Justice after Tom Wales was killed. Over 2002, I decided that really it should be my job to advocate for appropriate resources to be devoted to the Wales case.”

In 2002, at a meeting of U.S. Attorneys at the New York Hilton, McKay approached Larry Thompson, then the Deputy Attorney General, in a corridor and spoke to him about the case. As they were talking, Robert Mueller, the director of the F.B.I., appeared. “It was a little awkward,” McKay recalled. “Bob jumped in to kind of defend the F.B.I. I said, ‘Bob, we’ve got to have appropriate agent support for the Wales investigation, and we’re not getting it.’ He was fairly sharp with me, saying, ‘I’ve done everything I possibly can.’ I said, ‘I know that’s your intention, but it hasn’t worked out that way.’ Larry was kind of an observer to the whole thing. Bob said he would look into it.” (Mueller declined to comment.)

Not long after the meeting, John Ashcroft visited Seattle to give a speech at a Coast Guard base, but he didn’t meet with McKay’s staff or mention the Wales case. “In Seattle, you always have a sense that you’re an outpost, that people care more about things that happen on the East Coast,” McKay told me. Some of his colleagues in the U.S. Attorney’s Office had a different view of the Justice Department’s actions. “These are savvy people,” McKay said. “They looked at all these things—who attended the funeral, the low reward, the energy and resources in the investigation—and they concluded that Tom was not in favor because he was the president of Washington CeaseFire.” (On the first anniversary of Wales’s death, Larry Thompson came to Seattle to dedicate a conference room in the U.S. Attorney’s Office to him.)

Meanwhile, Wales’s friends began to talk about creating a memorial. “We were really concerned that he would be remembered only for his work on gun safety, and that was just one strand of his life,” Eric Redman, his former brother-in-law, said. “So his family started a foundation dedicated to the idea he talked about in the commencement speech: civic engagement. And the idea was to start a program at the University of Washington to sponsor students who wanted to do public service.” Norm Dicks, a longtime Democratic congressman from Bremerton, a town west of Seattle, agreed to try to procure federal funds for the program, and his staff suggested that Wales’s friends invite the Justice Department to make a contribution. In 2004, the Thomas C. Wales Foundation asked John McKay’s brother Mike, the former U.S. Attorney, who was still active in Republican politics, to make the request.

Mike McKay went to see Deborah Daniels, who was the Assistant Attorney General in charge of research and grants. “I told her that in my opinion Tom was probably killed in the line of duty,” McKay recalled. “I said that they should help fund the project at the University of Washington. I don’t remember exactly what she said, but I do remember it was off-putting.” Redman recalls hearing McKay describe the meeting soon after he returned from Washington. “He said that Daniels said she was concerned that Tom had been so involved with gun control,” Redman told me. (Daniels confirmed that she met with McKay but said that she does not remember their discussion and didn’t know at the time that Wales worked on gun control.) Norm Dicks is still trying to get federal funds for a University of Washington program.

There were few clues at the scene of the crime. “This may be as close as you come to a perfect murder,” an investigator on the case told me. “The only physical evidence left behind is the bullets and shell casings, nothing else. If you are an investigator in that circumstance, you have to look at motive.” The question, then, was who wanted Tom Wales dead.

“This doesn’t appear to be a random act,” Robert Geeslin, the F.B.I. agent who has been in charge of the Wales investigation for the past year, says. “What motivation was behind it? You are going to look at professional life, social life, personal life.” It was easy to determine that Wales remained friendly with his ex-wife, Elizabeth, who, in any event, was in Germany when he was shot. Since his separation, he had dated several women and, at the time of his death, was seeing Marlis DeJongh. “If we weren’t together at night, Tom would e-mail me before he went to bed,” DeJongh told me. “I printed out his e-mail first thing in the morning, and I thought my world was still bliss. Then I went to my office, where one of Tom’s colleagues called and told me what happened. And I just screamed, by myself, for half an hour.”

In July, three months before his death, Wales had been involved in an altercation at a parking garage near his office. According to Eric Redman, Wales drove his car into a limousine and got into a heated dispute with the limousine’s driver, who had asked him for his insurance card and driver’s license. Wales refused to provide these documents and drove from the garage in anger, hitting a truck on his way out. The limo driver called the police, and Wales was charged with a hit-and-run offense, though the charges were dropped a few weeks later. Neither Wales’s romantic life nor the fender bender yielded promising leads in the murder investigation.

Wales’s work on gun control apparently also failed to produce suspects. The fight over the statewide gun-control initiative had taken place four years before his death, and after that he had not been as involved in controversial issues. “It was kind of like proving a negative, ruling out all these possibilities,” Charles Mandigo, the former F.B.I. special agent, said. “We pursued every possible lead. There were some girlfriends; those were all pursued. We reviewed all the cases that he was involved in, and no stone was left unturned. At the same time, we were pursuing what appeared to be a potentially very logical suspect.”

Many A.U.S.A.s juggle dozens of cases, but Wales chose to take on just a few at a time. “Tom was extremely detail-oriented, and he would rewrite and rewrite, and his ultimate product was a work of perfection,” Mandigo said. “From an agent’s point of view, it would prove to be very frustrating. He didn’t move forward as fast as people wanted. People would say, ‘Hey, let’s get this thing moving.’ There was some frustration on agents’ part if a case got assigned to Tom. ‘I got a good prosecutor,’ they’d say, ‘but when is it going to move?’ ” For almost five years, Wales had been focussed on what he called “the helicopter case.”

The Seattle area, the home of Boeing and many of its suppliers, has long attracted aviation buffs who try to turn their hobby into a business. The Vietnam War created one such opportunity. During the war, the workhorse helicopter for the United States military was the Bell UH-1 series, better known as the Huey, which came in various configurations, most of them capable of carrying about a dozen troops. After the war, many of the five thousand or so UH-1s that had been used in the war began to circulate on the secondhand market in the United States. Several local entrepreneurs decided to retrofit the surplus military models for civilian use. Such conversions were legal, as long as they were conducted in accordance with safety rules established by the Federal Aviation Administration.

“There wasn’t much you could do commercially with a military model,” Robert Chadwell, a Seattle defense attorney, told me. “You couldn’t carry passengers, but you could with the civilian model. People started renovating the military models, in hopes of getting certification for civilian use. The issues could get very complicated. Could you rebuild a civilian model with military parts? How much of the original helicopter remained, and how much is rebuilt? How do you trace what happened to the original?” In the mid-nineties, Wales, working with his colleague Bob Westinghouse and a special agent from the F.A.A., began conducting an investigation of several helicopter conversions in the Seattle area. Chadwell represented one such operator, and had several contentious dealings with Wales. “Tom’s idea was that the prosecution was all about safety, that these rebuilt helicopters were unsafe,” Chadwell said. “But the investigation didn’t go well for the government. My client had renovated his helicopter under the supervision of F.A.A. people, and really hadn’t done anything wrong, safety-wise.” After a four-year investigation, Chadwell’s client’s company pleaded guilty to an infraction in its record-keeping, a minor federal offense, and paid a small fine.

“I had known Tom for years, and we went at it pretty good in that case,” Chadwell recalled. “I thought we had too good a relationship to let one case ruin it, so we had lunch to make sure there wasn’t going to be any residual damage. We both shared an interest in red wine, so we started this little club—the Snooty Red-Wine Drinkers. The bottles had to cost less than twenty dollars and had to have a story. We would get together four to six people, and we met once a month at my firm.”

By 2000, the investigation of the helicopter-conversion industry was winding down, with disappointing results for Wales and the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Only one case remained. In 1997, investigators had searched the premises of a helicopter company owned by two local men, James Anderson and Kim Powell. The firm, called Intrex Helicopter, which was based at Powell’s home, was renovating a single helicopter for civilian use. Still, the stakes were substantial. “A UH-1 that has been reconstituted and for which a certificate to carry passengers has been issued would be a much more valuable helicopter than one that is flying on a certificate that has limited use, by hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Westinghouse told me. (According to a court filing in a related civil case, Anderson and Powell believed that reconfiguring the helicopter would cost six hundred thousand dollars, and that Intrex could sell it for $1.2 million.)

In 2000, Wales obtained an eight-count indictment against Anderson and Powell on charges that included conspiracy to defraud the United States, mail fraud, and making false statements. The government accused the men of falsifying the helicopter’s maintenance records, and submitting them to the F.A.A., as part of an effort to certify the helicopter for civilian use. But the case fell apart the following year, when the prosecution’s expert witness from the F.A.A. decided that he no longer supported the government’s theory. On June 29, 2001, in an act that would be humiliating for any prosecutor, Wales was forced to dismiss the indictment against Anderson and Powell. He said that the expert now believed there was “no inherent safety consideration” in the conversion of the helicopter. (The company pleaded guilty to a “petty offense” and paid a thousand-dollar fine.) “The F.A.A. chief witness went south on him,” Elizabeth Wales says. “Tom felt awful about it.” Marlis DeJongh recalled, “Tom said that in all his years of being a prosecutor it was the most frustrating case that he had ever worked on.”

James Anderson, at the time that the case was dismissed, was a forty-year-old pilot for U.S. Airways, who lived alone in Beaux Arts, a Seattle suburb. On the night of Wales’s murder, Westinghouse told investigators that he thought Anderson should be considered as a suspect. “We were concerned about a number of possibilities, one of which was that the murder might be related to our work, and one subject was the helicopter case,” Westinghouse recalled. For the next several months, he received around-the-clock protection from U.S. marshals.

The F.B.I. has been investigating Anderson during the past six years, but no charges have been brought against him. (Anderson has never agreed to speak to investigators, and he declined to speak to me.) His attorney, Larry Setchell, said, “He is an innocent man and an honest man. Tom Wales was liked by everyone, including us. He did the right thing in our case by dismissing it. We were not mad at him.”

On July 27, 2001, a month after the indictment was dismissed, Anderson filed a motion against the U.S. Attorney’s Office, under an obscure law called the Hyde Amendment. The law, which was enacted in 1997, allows defendants who have been acquitted in federal court to sue the prosecutors in order to recoup their attorneys’ fees and legal expenses, provided they can show that the case was “vexatious, frivolous or in bad faith.” Anderson demanded a hundred and twenty-eight thousand dollars. On August 3, 2001, Wales’s office filed a response to Anderson’s lawsuit in federal district court. “We are convinced that he brings this motion in large part to discover the identity of additional witnesses that he imagines may have contributed to his indictment,” the brief stated. “During the course of the investigation, the Government received information from at least two persons indicative of defendant Anderson’s violent and retributive nature.” Other government documents pertaining to the case remain under seal, and the identities of the persons referred to in the brief have not been made public. In any event, Anderson’s motion was dismissed, and that ruling was upheld on appeal.

A month later, the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington took place, and, soon afterward, Wales again took a public stand for gun control. “Right after 9/11, the idea started to circulate that airline pilots should be allowed to carry weapons,” Trevor Neilson, the former vice-president of Washington CeaseFire, said. “Tom and I both thought it was a bad idea as a matter of public policy, but I thought it was wrong politically to come out against it at this time. The atmosphere was so strong in favor of doing anything to stop terrorism. But Tom disagreed. He thought arming pilots was a terrible idea, and he was going to say so publicly.” On September 25th, Wales participated in a half-hour debate—which was broadcast several times in the Seattle area, on NorthWest Cable News—about whether airline pilots should be allowed to carry guns in the cockpit. Pilots, he said, “are not trained as Green Berets, they are not trained as law enforcement.” He added, paraphrasing Duane Worth, the president of the Air Line Pilots Association, “It simply is not possible for an airline pilot to be Sky King and Wyatt Earp at the same time.” Sixteen days later, Wales was dead.

John McKay’s complaints about the investigation of Wales’s death did produce some changes. The reward was raised to a million dollars; more F.B.I. agents were assigned to the case; and the original government lawyer on the case was eventually replaced by Steven D. Clymer, who had been a senior prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles. Best known for leading the successful federal prosecution of the Los Angeles police officers who beat Rodney King, Clymer had become a professor at Cornell Law School, and he coördinated the investigation from there.

Progress came slowly. Anderson remained the only suspect; in 2004, the Seattle Times reported that the F.B.I. had searched Anderson’s home in Beaux Arts and removed twenty-seven boxes of possible evidence. Agents also searched two houses in the nearby city of Bellingham, one where Anderson used to live and one where he used to visit friends. In his former home, a bullet was removed from a wall, for analysis, and a bullet and a shell casing were taken from the friends’ home. The Times quoted two neighbors of Anderson’s in Bellingham who said that they had sometimes seen him fire a handgun into the ground from his back deck. (The Times, citing a policy of not naming criminal suspects, identified Anderson as a pilot who had been unsuccessfully prosecuted by Wales.)

Anderson’s movements on the night of the murder were traced in detail. In the early evening, he and a friend had attended a showing of “2001: A Space Odyssey” at a movie theatre about ten minutes from Wales’s home, in Queen Anne. After the murder, someone had made telephone calls from Anderson’s home in Beaux Arts, about twenty minutes from Queen Anne. Would Anderson have been able to commit the murder between the time the movie ended and the time the phone calls began? “It would have been very tight, but not impossible,” Charles Mandigo says.

Wales was killed by .380-calibre bullets that investigators quickly determined came from a Makarov semiautomatic handgun. These guns are widely available in the United States. Ballistics experts in the Washington State Crime Lab and at the F.B.I. noticed some unusual markings on the bullets indicating that they had been fired through a replacement gun barrel. “The Makarov uses corrosive gunpowder, and the barrels tend to wear out,” an investigator in the case told me. The F.B.I. located the manufacturer of the replacement barrel and learned that approximately twenty-six hundred of the barrels had been sold. The agency then undertook a search, which is ongoing, to find each barrel. “We feel real confident that this particular barrel was the barrel that created the ballistics that we had,” Robert Geeslin, the agent in charge of the investigation, said. (Investigators have been unable to establish that Anderson ever owned a Makarov, and found no connection between the bullets and the shell casing in Bellingham and the ballistic evidence in the Wales case.)

In Seattle, the case began to fade from public view. Only two local reporters, Steve Miletich and Mike Carter, of the Seattle Times, continued to write about it. Then, in late January of 2006, a typed letter, postmarked in Las Vegas, arrived at the F.B.I. field office in Seattle. “Re: Thomas C Wales,” it began, and went on:

OK, so I was broke and between jobs I got an anonymous call offering [the amount was redacted by the F.B.I.] to shoot the guy, so I drove to Seattle to do the job. I did not even know his name. Just got laid off from a job. Nice talking lady, I didn’t know her name, she called me, talked to me by name, and asked if I needed some money. I agreed to pursue the matter, hell, I was going bankrupt. . . .

I drove to the address, and then parked some distance away, north of downtown. I kind of camped out in the backyard of this house, and waited for the guy to settle in at his computer. Once he was there, I took careful aim. I shot two or possibly more times, and watched him collapse. I absurdly waited a few minutes and then left. I was sure he was dead.

Retracing my steps, I dropped off the gun, found my money, and returned to Vegas. I feel bad about it, but I needed the money, and there were no witnesses.

The envelope identified the sender as “Gidget” and gave as a return address the address of a business in Las Vegas with no apparent connection to the crime. Investigators believe that the letter may have been typed at a Kinko’s, or somewhere similar. No traces of DNA were found on the letter or on the envelope.

“I think it’s clear if you read the letter that the account described by the letter is fabricated,” an investigator told me. “That said, whoever wrote that letter has a fairly sophisticated knowledge of the murder, probably better than ninety-nine point nine per cent of the people in Seattle. Wales lived north of downtown, he was in his basement, and the shooter shot him from the back yard. If you were just a casual follower of the story, you wouldn’t know that. What’s the motive in sending it? Why do it? He wants to throw the investigators off.” An analysis of the letter by the Behavioral Sciences unit of the F.B.I. suggested that the author could be connected to the crime. The authorities also determined that Anderson was in Las Vegas at the time the letter was sent. (“He did not write the Las Vegas letter,” Larry Setchell, Anderson’s lawyer, told me.)

The case has taken a financial and emotional toll on Anderson, Setchell said. He no longer works for U.S. Airways, and Setchell declined to identify his current employer. “He is in retraining right now,” Setchell said in June. “He is senior enough that he will be flying left chair”—that is, captain—“in a jumbo jet by the end of the summer.”

By all accounts, John McKay was a successful U.S. Attorney in Seattle. He reorganized the office, increased the number of prosecutions, and improved morale. At the annual meetings of all U.S. Attorneys, McKay made a point of mentioning Wales. “Once a year, I stood up in front of my colleagues and talked about Tom Wales,” McKay said. “He was murdered, and he was murdered in the line of duty. Most of my colleagues really welcomed that. I felt it was my job to do it.” James Comey, who succeeded Thompson as Deputy Attorney General under Ashcroft, testified before Congress earlier this year that McKay “was excellent, in my experience. I had worked with him, as with the others, as a peer when I was U.S. Attorney in Manhattan and then as the Deputy Attorney General. So I had a very positive sense of John McKay.” On September 22, 2006, McKay’s office received a glowing evaluation from the Department of Justice. On December 7th, McKay, along with six other U.S. Attorneys, was fired.

The dismissals of the U.S. Attorneys soon became a national story, and Alberto Gonzales, the Attorney General, and other Administration officials have struggled to explain the reasons for the firings. Gonzales, in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in April, had little to say about McKay. To the best of his recollection, Gonzales said, McKay was fired because of his aggressive advocacy, in August, 2006, of an information-sharing system for federal prosecutors and for his complaints in a September 22, 2006, story in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer about budgetary constraints in the Seattle office. (McKay ran a pilot program for the Law Enforcement Information Exchange, a Justice Department initiative that allows state and federal investigators to share information. The program has since been expanded.)

Gonzales’s justifications for McKay’s dismissal now seem unlikely to be true, because it has become clear that Justice Department officials were seeking to fire McKay before 2006. On March 2, 2005, Kyle Sampson, Gonzales’s chief of staff, included McKay’s name on a list of thirteen U.S. Attorneys to be fired, in an e-mail to Harriet Miers, the White House counsel. Sampson sent the e-mail four months after the 2004 elections, and after McKay decided not to bring charges against the Democratic Party, or people affiliated with it, in Washington State, in the wake of a narrow victory by Christine Gregoire, the Democratic candidate, in the governor’s race. The contest, which was resolved after two recounts, prompted a lawsuit by the state Republican Party alleging widespread voting irregularities.

Several of the fired U.S. Attorneys had declined to prosecute Democrats in electoral disputes. Many Democrats have suggested that the prosecutors were dismissed by Gonzales and the Bush White House in retaliation for failing to advance Republican political objectives. But, in a deposition before the House Judiciary Committee in April, Sampson offered another explanation for McKay’s dismissal. He said that McKay might have been fired because he had been too aggressive in his advocacy of the investigation of Tom Wales’s murder. Sampson testified that McKay had approached Larry Thompson, then the Deputy Attorney General, and demanded that he “take some action” on the investigation, and that subsequently there had been tension between the two men. (“I don’t remember being mad at John McKay,” Thomp-son told me. “We always had to do balancing acts about how to allocate resources, but I never thought John acted inappropriately in the Wales case.” McKay said, “Larry Thompson was extremely supportive of the Wales investigation, and of me personally. I’m unaware of there having been any criticism.”)

Sampson’s testimony caused a sensation in Seattle. “The idea that I was pushing too hard to investigate the assassination of a federal prosecutor—it’s mind-numbing,” McKay told reporters at the time. “If it’s true, it’s just immoral, and if it’s false, then the idea that they would use the death of Tom Wales to cover up what they did is just uncon-scionable.” After news of Sampson’s statements broke, six Democratic congressmen from Washington State wrote to Glenn A. Fine, the inspector general of the Justice Department, who had begun an inquiry into the firings, asking that he investigate whether “Mr. McKay’s removal may have been related to his zealous advocacy for increased Justice Department attention to the murder of Tom Wales.”

The question of why McKay and the other U.S. Attorneys were fired remains unanswered. (Harriet Miers has been subpoenaed to answer questions on the subject before the House Judiciary Committee, but she has refused to appear, citing executive privilege. A court fight about the matter seems likely.) The notion that McKay was fired for failing to prosecute Democrats is plausible. But the passion that McKay brought to the Wales case may have played a part, too.

After the disclosure of a possible connection between Wales’s murder and McKay’s firing, Alberto Gonzales assured Wales’s family that the Justice Department was committed to solving the killing. On June 27th, Gonzales, who was visiting Seattle, met with Elizabeth Wales; the Wales’s daughter, Amy; and Eric Redman, and told them that the case remained a priority. According to Geeslin, more than ten investigators, from the F.B.I. and the Seattle police, are working on the case full time. “The level of commitment is very, very high,” Geesl-in said.

With the passage of time, though, a prosecution becomes more difficult. Mary Aylward, Wales’s next-door neighbor and a witness to some of the events of October 11, 2001, died in a car accident last year. Jerry Diskin, the acting U.S. Attorney, who came to the hospital after Wales was shot, has also died. Solving a murder case more than six years after the crime occurred is rare.

The F.B.I. will not confirm that Anderson remains under scrutiny. However, last August the agency again searched houses in the Seattle area in which he had lived. In December, he was compelled by subpoena to spend eight hours giving handwriting samples to investigators. Around then, Anderson, who had married, for the second time, in 2005, separated from his wife, Andrea, and on January 12, 2007, he filed for divorce. In a court filing on March 7th, Andrea Anderson sought a restraining order against her husband. “The Court should be informed and take into account that [Anderson] has been and continues to be the chief murder suspect in the Thomas Wales investigation,” she wrote in a sworn declaration. “I recently received a phone message March 2, 2007, from my husband stating he would create a website in my name, with my address, my phone number and pictures of me stating I am a whore because I stated to some acquaintances that he was the suspect. [Anderson] has a history of stalking his former wives, and myself when we were briefly separated. He is capable of anything, and I am fearful that if I do not do as he wishes . . . he may retaliate.” Two days later, Anderson filed a reply, in which he denied his wife’s charges. “I have not stalked my current wife and have not threatened her or tried to manipulate her,” he stated. He added, “I am not going to comment on the ‘FBI’ material as it is not relevant to this case.” (The judge overseeing the divorce ordered Anderson and his wife to stay away from each other.)

In June of this year, Andrea Anderson testified before the grand jury investigating the Wales murder, but investigators caution that her ex-husband may never be charged. Referring to Anderson, one law-enforcement official said, “If you investigate somebody for five years and you haven’t closed the deal, you have to draw inferences from that, too.” ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the August 6, 2007, issue.

Recommended Stories

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.